At 5:39 PM 12/15/99 -0800, Amy Ione wrote:
>
>One more thought. I would be interested in hearing about how musicians, for
>example, might interpret ideas about 'narrative.' Anyone what to take a
>stab at this? I think it is probably assumed that music has 'language,'
>whatever that means.
1.) On the question of whether or not "music has 'language'", it's not
entirely clear to me whether or not the assertion that "X has language"
means much more than that X is complexly structured along highly
conventionalized lines. The best known attempt to bring music under the
fold of (Chomskyian) linguistic theory is Fred Lerdahl & Jay Jackendoff, _A
Generative Theory of Tonal Music_, MIT Press, 1983. It has nothing to say
about music as narrative.
Some "data points":
2.) It is common for jazz musicians (at least of a certain era) to
differentiate a really good improvisation from a mediocre one by saying
that the good one "tells as story." That's what Roy Eldridge, for example,
said about a solo Louis Armstrong played on "Chinatown." Now, just what
that means and how those musicians would explicate that, that's not clear.
But I note that an improvisation can be correct in the sense that no wrong
notes are played, and yet be thoroughly uninteresting.
Many of these same musicians would assert that, in order to play a ballad
effectively, you need to know the lyrics.
3.) A classical pianist I know told me that, as a student, he was having
trouble getting the hang of Mozart sonatas. He asked his teacher for
advice and his teacher told him to treat each subject (i.e. major motif) as
a character in a drama. He did that and the sonatas began to make sense.
4.) Consider _Fantasia_. Disney took purely instrumental music (often
modified considerably from the original) and added visual narrative to it.
While I don't for a minute think that those particular narratives are the
only ones you could imagine, I also don't think that what Disney did was
"unnatural." The music invites narrative interpretation/rendering.
5.) You might want to take a look at Susan McClary, _Feminine Endings:
Music, Gender, and Sexuality_, U. of Minnesota Press, 1991. In general,
she is interested in explicating the (gendered) narratives implicit in
instrumental music, mostly of the European classical tradition. One of the
themes she develops in a number of essays is that many of the
harmonic/structural conventions of classical music were invented to serve
the dramatic and narrative needs of the opera. They retain their
dramatic/narrative function when separated from the opera.
William L. Benzon 201.217.1010
708 Jersey Ave. Apt. 2A bbenzon@mindspring.com
Jersey City, NJ 07302 USA http://www.newsavanna.com/wlb/
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